VOL. XVIII, ISSUE 1
Spring 2024, VOL. XVIII, ISSUE 1
EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION
Gale Sigal and Deborah Sinnreich-Levi
TEAMS is proud to announce the publication of Volume XVIII of The Once and Future Classroom.The four excellent essays in this volume touch on a diversity of topics: Annie Doucet’s innovative method for teaching Old French; Heather Horton’s student-centered method for teaching medieval Jerusalem; Lisa Lampert-Weissig’s diachronic approach to teaching Jewish-Christian relations; and Belle Tuten’s piece on the medieval medicine classroom.
In “Teaching Old French in the Language Classroom,” Annie Doucet describes how she engages students to “think logically and analytically about French grammar.” In doing so, she inspires students to appreciate “the dynamism of language” by demonstrating how the French language has continually evolved, while also presenting students with a clear, concrete explanation “for French’s more esoteric rules.” The innovative end-of-term hands-on project she assigns builds upon the classwork earlier in the semester. The steps Doucet outlines take students on a journey to create their own manuscripts. This process can be directed toward different student levels. Her students focus either on “the historical and cultural aspects of medieval reading practices” or on creative writing. For more advanced undergraduates, she uses digitized manuscripts in the classroom and shows how much fun students can have as they examine texts she selects in Old French. On the graduate level, she incorporates paleographical and transcription practices, while helping students increase their medieval French reading proficiency. Another way to use her method at almost any level is to have students create “their own commonplace books with their favorite quotations, annotations, and glosses.” Demonstrating how Old French evolved into Modern French, Doucet also points toward the more recent language changes that involve “the need for nonbinary pronouns and adjectives in French….to develop a more inclusive language that better represents” the LGBT+ community.
Heather Horton’s “Teaching Medieval Jerusalem: Student-Centered Approaches to Interpreting Historical Objects and Spaces,” describes a course Horton created for art and design history undergraduates called, “Jerusalem: Connection and Conquest (1000-1400).” The course was taught at Pratt University for a group of non-majors among whom were “many international learners with widely ranging cultural and educational backgrounds.” Horton has students consider Jerusalem in multiple ways: as “a physical space, an energizing idea, a point of artistic influence, and the bedrock of religious and cultural identities.” The course demonstrates how there was not simply one Jerusalem, but many. However, the focus on the multidimensionality of one specific locus led to cohesion. One goal was to introduce the idea “that historical objects were made by ‘real’ people, responding to the pressures and opportunities of their historical moments and places.” In shifting her pedagogical approach from Europe to Jerusalem, Horton widens students’ understanding of a single place into “plural medieval Jerusalems, across cultures and over time” and how medieval art and culture lived within the three religions that settled there.
Lisa Lampert-Weissig’s essay, “Teaching Jewish-Christian Relations: A Diachronic Approach,” opens with the problem confronting many medievalists today: how to design courses that appeal to students who are interested in modern literatures and contemporary issues. Considering the many pressures on students, how can we attract students to what seems to them irrelevant or remote? Lampert-Weissig wrote her essay “Antisemitism in English Literature,” well before the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre of Israelis by Hamas, but she, like many others, was already well aware of rising antisemitism worldwide. Her essay is even more pertinent to our world today after Oct. 7th’s horrors and their complex aftermath. As Lampert-Weissig asserts, “students need, perhaps now more than ever, to be able to recognize and understand the long history of antisemitism.” She provides an overview of debates among scholars, particularly medievalists, concerning the use of the term “antisemitism” for premodern contexts. She has found that combining literary and visual materials together in her teaching is especially fruitful. For example, she presents images that depict blood libel, ritual murder accusations, host desecrations and the representation of the relationship between Ecclesia and Synagoga. Further, confronting “centuries-old connections between literary and visual tropes in antisemitic discourses is essential for students attempting to understand what they encounter through digital media” today.
Belle S. Tuten’s “Using Problem-Based Learning in the Medieval Medicine Classroom.” discusses her course, “Medieval Medicine” in which she adapts problem-based learning (PBL) to “primary and secondary readings from historical, archaeological, paleopathological, and biological sources.” The course covers the history of medicine from the Classical period to the late 15thcentury, and includes ancient, medieval, and Islamic sources. The students in “Medieval Medicine” explore the history of medicine in medieval Western Europe by analyzing “the ancient, medieval and Islamic sources that helped to shape it.” Tuten’s approach shows the value of interdisciplinary work for students of the history of medicine and enables collaboration between humanities and STEM students. This interdisciplinary teamwork among majors in biology, humanities and social science students enable them to learn from “multiple research perspectives.” One of Tuten’s aims is to “bridge the gap between students in humanities and STEM … who bring different skills and expectations to the process.” Using Problem-based Learning, students “develop flexible learning and collaboration skills” while also drawing on their previous knowledge, “which strengthens as it is repeated and integrated into the new process.” Students therefore benefit from the work of the whole group.